Editor’s note: The Music Emporium, located at 3100 23rd Ave., closed its doors after 36 years in business with a celebration held Saturday, March 6. Bliss Green, who teaches English at the University of Alabama Birmingham, was there, and submitted the following essay. Green also is a 1979 graduate of Meridian High School.

Standing in the throng outside the Music Emporium on Saturday night, someone mentioned that they probably bought their first album at the Sound Shop in Village Fair Mall. A woman immediately replied, “Then I discovered the cool store.” This, in a nutshell, is the difference between mass-market shopping and the independent-store experience. The purpose of the mall was (still is) to create a retail-palooza which overwhelms the senses with choice and neon, like a county fair, or a casino. It was not a space designed to create community among shoppers (unless you consider the Running of the Brides at Filene’s Basement some kind of community). But this is indeed what happened at the Music Emporium (and still does, at the diminishing number of independent record stores across the land). We’d swap stories about last weekend, compare favorite artists, score tickets for shows at the Coliseum. The proprietor of the store would put a record on that we’d never heard before, our heads would start bobbing as we sifted through the racks, and soon we couldn’t imagine living without that awesome album. We would make friends for life, with music and with people.

I asked attendees if they remembered the first album they ever bought at the Emporium, and though a few people would scratch their chin, or go “I’d probably be embarrassed to say,” soon the memory would come. “There is no correct answer!” somebody said, which is also true. A partial list of artists and albums will give you the scope of the almost four-decade existence of the Music Emporium: Grand Funk Railroad Live (a heavy double-live album, sez he); Elton John’s Goodbye Yellow Brick Road; Traffic’s John Barleycorn Must Die; David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust and The Spiders form Mars (where the album explicitly said on the back cover, PLAY AT LOUDEST VOLUME); Gram Parsons’ Grievous Angel and Commander Cody’s Live at the Warfield; the Chicago album with “25 or 6 to Four” on it; Eric Clapton’s 461 Ocean Boulevard (we started singing Clapton’s hit Marley cover “I Shot the Sheriff”); Glenn Campbell’s Rhinestone Cowboy (a tragic story — she dropped the record when she got home, it broke in half, and she had to settle for the 45 — but…there was still a copy of the LP in the bins on Saturday — it’s never too late!); the Bee Gees; Blue Oyster Cult; The Allman Brothers, of course, either Idlewild South or Eat a Peach; Michael Jackson’s Thriller, of course; The Beastie Boys’ Licenced to Ill (with the just-instituted Parental Advisory Sticker on it); Run-DMC; NWA (“I would save my lunch money, and every two weeks, I’d ride my bike up here and buy a rap tape…a tape was, like, nine-something?”). One younger interviewee said that, although he definitely bought a lot of albums at the store, he also spent time tracking down European bootlegs of Phish concerts.

Me, I still have my vinyl copy of Head East’s Flat as a Pancake (“Never Been Any Reason” was the hit on WZZQ) and yes, the cover was a picture of a pancake. But even on the mono turntable my father, an elementary-principal, borrowed from the school (until I got a real setup from Hooper’s one Christmas), I treasured the adventure into that record, and later put the hit on every Maxell mixtape I made for friends with cassette decks. People at the event fondly recalled albums they’d listened to on 8-track, though no one speaks too fondly of that format, the sound fading out during the middle of Tommy Bolin’s immortal “Post Toastee” — click — then fading back in. Vinyl still rules, of course. Just ask the guy who’d gotten a copy of the Beatles’ collection of their number one hits.

I did make a social faux pas by trying one other question: Had anyone ever bought some, er, “tobacco accessories”? (Also on sale, right there on the counter, at Sound Shop in the mall — this was the ’70s, y’all.) A typical response was an exaggerated (wink-wink, nudge-nudge) “Oh, no, never.” Ah, well. As a great Southern philosopher once put it, “Don’t ask me no questions, and I won’t tell you no lies.”

But the tone of the reminiscences was consistently positive. There was almost no fogey-ish “Wasn’t everything better than it is now?” People simply treasured a place that had played a valuable part in their lives, though Art Matthews, ever-humble in this regard, wouldn’t agree that it was pretty much the “heart of the city,” which it was for music-heads like myself, waiting for the bell to ring in Mr. Rush’s physics class on Tuesday so we could cross the street from the high school and pick up that new Foreigner album. Others may flash back to J.P. Moon’s or Cash McCool’s (disco version)/Lilly Langtree’s (“Urban Cowboy” version), or Godfather’s Pizza or the Corridor videogame parlor or the parking lot behind Bonanza on Friday night (all valid — there is no correct answer), but I’d have to rank the Emporium tops.

Here are a few comments from the Matthews siblings: “I got [Stevie Ray Vaughan’s Texas Flood] just because of the album cover, and [on hearing it] I went, ‘Oh my Lord!’” (Steve); “Somebody comes in and they say, ‘I don’t know the name and I don’t know who did it, but it had this word in [the song]…and nine times out of ten we’d find it.” (Aislinn, on her favorite memories of running the store); “Dad was always bringing records home, and I was exposed to…anything…Sonny and Brownie, Eric Clapton, The Moody Blues, Allman Brothers, Pink Floyd…I mean, dad’s favorites became my favorites” (Josh). Connections made between the people we love and the music we love. To be a fogey just for a second, let me say that nobody gets that at Walmart, or sitting alone, downloading tracks off the internet. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that.) And could I please request that our younger readers turn off the cell and the computer and the TV and try sitting still and listening to a great record all the way through? (May I suggest Rumours?) I swear, it could change your life.

All in all, I think this last comment from a longtime patron sums up the mood of Saturday night’s event pretty well: “This has been a labor of love for a long time. I think we’re blessed that they kept it open as long as they did.” Amen, brother.